From that moment on, Zachys was his and he was Zachys.
From the beginning, Zacharia showed a grasp of the market, great salesmanship, and a willingness to fight.
The retail liquor trade in New York state in those days was burdened by antiquated laws and corrupt officialdom. Under the state's Prohibition-era fair-trade wine and liquor laws, prices were fixed. "You sold Four Roses two cents cheaper than the other guy," Zacharia recalls, "and you lost your license."
On the heels of a well-publicized corruption case, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller appointed a commission to consider changes in the state's liquor laws. The so-called Moreland Commission favored striking down the fair-trade laws. Zacharia, taking his cue from the commission, decided to test the laws and began marking down prices. Fellow retailers -- and big distributors -- went ballistic. Zacharia soon found himself in court, but he had lines of 30 and 40 customers waiting outside his store.
Eventually, the federal courts struck down the laws as unconstitutional restraints on trade. Sales at Zachys soared from $400,000 to over $1 million in 1964. "I knew how to sell, and the next guy didn't," is how Zacharia explains it.
Zachys soon became a regular advertiser in The New York Times, with full-page ads trumpeting "20%-Off Days," "Bordeaux Extravaganzas," and the wildly popular "Half-Bottle Madness." The ads were expensive -- and still are, anywhere from $10,000 for a full page in the local edition to $30,000 in the national editions -- and Zacharia spent prodigiously. "Take a Drive to Scarsdale," his ads recommended, and many a New York City customer did just that to buy wines and liquor that were now heavily discounted.
The Zachys store in Scarsdale, N.Y., is a destination for wine lovers. "Everything is perfect," says one aficionado.
Four decades later, folks are still taking the drive to Scarsdale. "It's a great place for aficionados," says Dr. Michael Apstein, who makes the trip from Boston several times a year. A Harvard Medical School professor, Apstein writes about wine as a freelancer for The Boston Globe. In an age when he can -- and does -- order much of his wine over the telephone or the Internet, Apstein enjoys walking into a store "where everything is perfect, from the smell of wooden Bordeaux cases to the sight of the labels on old bottles of fine Burgundy." That, he adds, "is the allure of Zachys."
"Dad," says Jeff Zacharia, "didn't invent the wave, but he knew how to ride the crest." What Don Zacharia perceived -- and what many a retail wine merchant did not -- was that in the late 1960s Americans' drinking habits were changing. "It seemed to me that people were drinking a lot more white wine rather than cocktails," Zacharia recalls. "I was part of that movement myself."
Since he didn't know much about fine wine -- when he bought the store, wine accounted for less than 10% of sales -- he approached Sam Aaron, the co-owner of Sherry-Lehmann, the famous Madison Avenue carriage shop, and asked if he could study what Aaron did. Somewhat to Zacharia's surprise, the answer was yes. After that, says Zacharia, "I hung out, watched what they did till they turned out the lights and kicked me out for the night."
Perhaps the single most important thing he picked up from Aaron was the notion of selling futures. At the time, Aaron was one of the few American wine merchants in the futures business. He bought Bordeaux wine while it was still in cask, years away from being ready to drink, and sold it to his retail customers for delivery after it had been bottled and shipped, one or two years down the line. The idea was that the wine's price would go up, saving the customer money later while putting cash into the retailer's hands now.
The futures game is a gamble, a crapshoot really, for both retailer and customer. For one thing, only a few vintages are likely to gain markedly in price. If the retailer is wrong about a vintage -- if he pumps one that is a bust or proves merely average -- the client is sure to feel that he's been taken. But if the vintage turns out to be really fine, and the buyer makes a killing, then the retailer is a hero.
For the customer, futures present another risk: What if your retail wine merchant goes belly-up? Many an order for futures has been lost just that way. "It was a problem in the 1980s," says Ray Isle, the former managing editor of Wine & Spirits, "and it's still a problem today. One supplier went bankrupt just last year." Unlike retailers that buy only after the customer has given them a check, Zachys buys futures on its own, in advance of the consumer order. That, says Apstein, is "why I don't mind paying a slight premium to buy futures through Zachys. You know you'll get what you ordered."
Having gotten into the futures business with the 1970 Bordeaux, Zachys scored big-time with the 1982 vintage. While a number of prominent European wine writers lauded the vintage, conventional wisdom in the U.S. ran against the '82s. The naysayers, however, did not reckon with Don Zacharia -- or with Robert M. Parker Jr.
